As the daylight was fading, we walked together along the shore. I was nervous but still found myself pouring out my heart to him, voicing my uncertainties and fears. He put his arm around my shoulder, giving me a reassuring squeeze. I continued talking, perhaps using words to shield myself from what I felt or—even more—to prevent asking him how he felt. Finally he stopped walking, took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and spoke.

“What will it take,” Jesus told me, “for me to convince you I love you?”

The encounter I just described may have happened only in my mind, during a scene I visualized in prayer while on a retreat several years ago. Yet the sense of peace and joy that washed over me as Jesus spoke those words to me—“I love you”—was as real as anything I’ve experienced in my life.

“God loves you.” Those words have been part of my life since the first days of my faith formation, since my earliest childhood memories. And it’s been one of the major battles of my life to believe those words, to embrace them and fully accept that they’re true.

When I was growing up in the Catholic Church during the early 1970s, religion classes were a big part of my life. That time was the Age of Aquarius—or perhaps more to the point, the Age of “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell”—and one of the messages I heard over and over again from my teachers was “God is love.”

Today it’s easy to make fun of that era, a time when we kids got little exposure to Scripture and tradition but instead made lots of collages from pictures cut out of magazines. But I think back to how often I heard those messages: “God is love” and “God loves you.” And really—what better message can a church communicate?

Besides, the belief that God is love, and loves us, is Scriptural. In Exodus, one of the earliest books of the Bible, God describes Himself in chapter 34 as “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” The phrase “abounding in steadfast love” is so important that it returns numerous times in the Psalms and the Prophets.